


they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul

by eena



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, F/M, Gen, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-17
Updated: 2012-07-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 22:56:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/436368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eena/pseuds/eena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott and Stiles have been friends since before either of them could remember.  Stiles was there to roll her eyes and mutter ‘like that’s a secret’ when Scott confesses to liking girls in that way.  Scott is there to nod and wrinkle her nose in confusion with a ‘so ADD, or ADHD, or some other alphabet combination?’ when Stiles’s hyperactivity goes from personality quirk to medical condition.  There’s nothing they haven’t faced down together, side by side with Scott’s eyes wide and a sarcastic remark squirming past Stiles’s lips.</p><p>Lycanthropy, Stiles argues, should be no different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a Gender Swap fic with girl!Scott and girl!Stiles. I’m not really sure where this is coming from, but I know I want to write it real bad, and my tumblr friends are giving me copious amounts of encouragement-so yeah.

**title:** they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul  
 **author:** eena  
 **rating:** R-ish, maybe? I don’t know, swears will be sworn.  
 **category:** Teen Wolf-Gender Swap  
 **disclaimer:** if I owned Stiles, I would never let him leave my bedroom . . . I mean, I don’t own any of the characters or plots from Teen Wolf. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to say.  
 **spoilers:** everything and all up to the latest season two episodes.  
 **summary:** Scott and Stiles have been friends since before either of them could remember. Stiles was there to roll her eyes and mutter ‘like that’s a secret’ when Scott confesses to liking girls in that way. Scott is there to nod and wrinkle her nose in confusion with a ‘so ADD, or ADHD, or some other alphabet combination?’ when Stiles’s hyperactivity goes from personality quirk to medical condition. There’s nothing they haven’t faced down together, side by side with Scott’s eyes wide and a sarcastic remark squirming past Stiles’s lips.

Lycanthropy, Stiles argues, should be no different.

**notes:** So, this is a Gender Swap fic with girl!Scott and girl!Stiles. I’m not really sure where this is coming from, but I know I want to write it real bad, and my tumblr friends are giving me copious amounts of encouragement-so yeah.

**_Wolf Moon-Part One_ **

 

~0~

 

Scott is in her pyjamas, brushing her teeth, doing _normal_ teenage things that normal teenagers do on a school night when she hears strange noises coming from outside her window.

 

And here’s the truly sucky thing about having the child of an overworked single mom: you fake independence and confidence whenever your mom is around, but turn into a gibbering mess at the first sign of danger. Like, sure she tells her mom that she’s totally okay with staying alone in the house when she has to, and normally she is okay, but any hint of imminent troubles do tend to zap her confidence stores right down to zero.

 

But it’s the twenty-first century, right? Girls aren’t supposed to jump at every shadow. They’re supposed to be aware, she knows, and that’s why she’s always got the old Louisville slugger at hand. Scott’s not exactly the star of the girl’s lacrosse team, but she’s been practicing and working out and she can swing the bat pretty damn hard. Her hands are kind of shaking when she grabs it, and her breath is coming out in shallow puffs as she eases her way down the stairs, but she’s not backing down. Her mom wouldn’t back down, and neither would Scott.

 

The noises seem to be coming from the front porch. She has to take a fortifying breath (or ten) before she can yank open the door and rush outside in a flurry of primal yells and threatening batting manoeuvers. 

 

She doesn’t really expect to be met with a few hysterical screams from the intruder. Hysterical screams that sound really familiar.

 

“What the actual fuck, Scott!”

 

The panic fogs clears and there’s her best friend Stiles, hanging upside down and tangled up in her mother’s shrubs and giving Scott a look that suggested _she’s_ the unstable one. The adrenalin recedes too quickly, and Scott ends up slumped against her front door and frantically searching the pockets of her pyjama bottoms for her inhaler.

 

“What are you doing, you freak?” and it would sound a lot fiercer if she didn’t have to speak around a handful of short-breathed rasps. She jams her inhaler between her lips, takes in a few greedy puffs, and counts down from ten to control her breathing. “We have a front door, Stiles! You have a key to it!”

 

Stiles’s “No I don’t” scoff is not entirely convincing, but that’s not the issue. “Whatever, help me down. I came here on seriously important business!”

 

“Doubtful,” Scott mutters, but obliges her nutcase of a best friend by walking over and tugging her out of the greenery. “So, what’s so seriously important?”

 

Stiles straightens her spine, not unlike the crack of a whip, and sends a truly frighteningly giddy look her way. “My dad got a call just now-they found _a body_ in the woods. A body!”

 

Scott’s stomach sinks down to somewhere near her ankles. This was going nowhere good.

 

“You know, we have tryouts tomorrow-“

 

“Scott! Did you not hear me?” Stiles is looking slightly more bug-eyed than usual, dark blonde hair a scary mass of curls and leaves looming over them both. “A body-in the woods-a dead body in the woods. Here-in Beacon Hills-and we’re going to go see it. It’ll be super cool-“

 

“The hell it will! It’ll be a dead body! I don’t need those kinds of nightmares, all right?”

 

Stiles rolls her eyes so hard that her head tips back. “Come _on!_ Scott, don’t be such a girl. We’re not going to have an opportunity like this ever again! And I need you to come with me-I mean, who else would even be caught speaking to me, let alone creeping into the woods in the middle of the night with me?”

 

“Nobody sane,” Scott grumbles and twists her lips up into a contemplative frown. “You’re not going to let this one slide, are you?”

 

Stiles leans in close, green eyes practically sparkling. “The call said they had already found a part of it. _A part_! The body is in parts!”

 

And then she’s screwed, because Stiles is looking like Christmas came early this year and she’s shit at telling her friend no.

 

“You have so many problems,” Scott glowers and viciously pulls some leaves out of Stiles’s hair.

 

And Stiles has the audacity to do a little victory dance right there on the porch. “And the bestest best friend ever!”

 

“Wow, a BBF. Aren’t I special?”

 

But she grabs her keys from her room and locks up before following Stiles out to her crap-ass Jeep to go trolling through the dark woods in search of mutilated corpses.

 

Because, apparently, that’s what BBFs do.

 

~0~

 

“Have I mentioned that this is the worst idea ever!”

 

Stiles tosses a feral grin over her shoulder, barely discernible in the weak moonlight. Scott jerks up her flashlight, catches her friend right in the eye and blinds her. When Stiles stumbles into a tree with a high-pitched yelp ten seconds later, Scott’s not even sorry.

 

Okay, maybe a little sorry.

 

Of course, this being Stiles, the girl all but bounces off the tree and skips forward without missing a beat. Scott narrows her eyes at the jerky traipsing her friend does through the trees, figures Stiles either didn’t take enough Adderall, or did and immediately followed it up with a bucket full of candy. Neither scenario means anything good.

 

“So, exactly how many parts are we talking about here?”

 

“Two, or I guess just one,” Stiles spins on her heels and is suddenly very much in Scott’s personal space. “It was halved. _Halved_! So twisted.”

 

Scott looks back, wide eyed and exasperated. “I totally agree.”

 

And then Stile is off like a drunken rocket, skittering through the bush and generally making more noise than someone trying to be stealthy should be making. Scott grumbles under her breath and follows, though her progress is way more linear than Stiles’s, and she doesn’t fall down every forty-seven seconds either.

 

“Which half are we looking for, exactly?”

 

That puts a slight damper on things. Stiles stops and bites her lip. “Huh, didn’t really think about that?”

 

Scott sighs. “Of course not. And the killer? He or she is not still out here, right?”

 

Stiles laughs nervously, steps closer to Scott and tries not to look petrified. “Of course, I mean, dad didn’t say anything in particular about it, but every single damn cop in the BHPD is down here. It wouldn’t be smart to stick around.”

 

“Unless two idiot teenage girls come stumbling into the woods, all hyper and hostage-ready for said psycho, right?” Scott turns the flashlight on Stiles again, watches those green eyes widen as reason came barrelling back in before-

 

“Didn’t think of that,” and Stiles pushes off once again. Scott moans pitifully, but follows nonetheless. Stiles starts scrambling up a series of hills in a frenzy of awkward limbs and inappropriate for the situation black flats, and Scott knows it’s a bit of spite on her friend’s part. The climbing nearly does her in, has her sucking on her inhaler before scrambling over to where Stiles had thrown herself onto the floor. There are muffled shouts and beams of light cutting through the forest now, and suddenly the whole mess is entirely too stupid for her to stomach.

 

“Stiles, let’s go!” she tugs on Stiles’s sleeve, trying to be as quiet as humanly possible because she really doesn’t want Stiles’s dad to catch her out here. He’d just call her mom and they would both want to know why she had let Stiles talk her into stupidity once again, and Scott never really has a good answer for that question.

 

“We’re not going back,” Stiles slaps away Scott’s hands and then points to some random spot amongst the dark trees. “That way.”

 

And there’s no real reason for her to follow, because this is obviously another tactic Stiles has pulled from her ass in order to delay the inevitable. But she’s a loyal and long-suffering friend, so she gets up and catapults herself into pursuit. Stiles somehow manages to trip on, like, every blade of grass along the way and very soon ends up with her face planted in the dirt. Scott rushes to help, but Stiles scrambles up as quick as ever and then crashes back down onto her ass when she nearly bowls over a police dog.

 

“Holy shit!”

 

Scott spins, turns off her flashlight, and flattens herself against a nearby tree almost by instinct. Stiles has gotten her into enough sticky situations that she’s kind of had to learn to make herself small and unnoticeable until they had cruised their way out of the danger zone. 

 

(And it’s worked every time except that one time Stiles convinced her that they needed to sneak into the boys’ locker room and cram Kaden Thompson’s locker full of the gardening’s club compost heap offerings. Sufficed to say, her mom, Stiles’s dad, and the senior boys’ varsity lacrosse team had not been too impressed with her that day.)

 

And then: “Hold up; this delinquent’s mine.”

 

Crap. The sheriff’s on the scene and not sounding very happy at all.

 

Stiles, bless her crazy heart, tries; she really, really tries. “Oh, hi Daddy!”

 

There’s a loud, almost indignant sigh. “Do you really spend your time listening in on my phone calls?”

 

“No,” Stiles is, again, entirely unconvincing, and whatever bravado she conjured for this evaporates quickly. “I also read all your text messages,” is said in a decidedly lower, dare-she-say, shameful tone.

 

There’s a painful silence. “Where’s Scott?”

 

“Scott? Oh, she’s at home, the scaredy-cat. Said she wanted to get a full night’s sleep or whatever, because tomorrow is like the first day of school. The girl’s a travesty.”

 

A circle of light appears in the trees directly in front of Scott. She sucks in a breath and holds almost deathly still while the sheriff called for her. “Scott? Are you out there? Scott? Scotia?”

 

Stiles tsk-tsks quite loudly. “Dad, you know she hates that whole full name thing. It’s a good thing she’s nowhere near by to hear it.”

 

The police dog takes this moment to bark again, and Scott flinches against the tree at the sudden noise. “Sir?” comes from the young-sounding deputy, and it’s tinged with such confusion that she knows the man is new to the station. Only people who have never met Stiles before get so utterly dazed in her presence. Scott is pretty sure Stiles could induce a brain aneurysm in others if she put her mind and mouth to the task. And in that way, the ADHD is almost a blessing. Scott is pretty sure that if Stiles could actually develop a significantly long attention span, then the next step would surely be world domination.

 

“It’s okay, I got it,” the sheriff sounds a little less pissed to high holy hell. “I’m just going to escort this little pain in my neck back to her car. And on the way, we’re going to have a long conversation about the criminality in invasion of privacy.”

 

Stiles manages to get a “but the government gets away with it,” out before there’s some rustling and the sound of slowly fading footsteps. Scott remains hiding behind that tree for a while longer, just until she no longer hears the barks of the dogs or sees the flashes of police flashlights. 

 

After what is probably a century or two of waiting, the woods around her are quiet. Dark and quiet, and she’s now officially on her own. And without a ride, if the sheriff actually did take Stiles all the way back to the Jeep and waited until his daughter drove away. Scott makes a long list of things she wants to shout at her idiot best friend the next time she sees her and then moves out of hiding.

 

It doesn’t take her long to get as lost as fuck, and she’s down to cursing Stiles in both English and Spanish while trying to coax her phone to work in the middle of shit-nowhere. When the phone doesn’t comply, Scott adds that to the list of things to blame on Stiles before picking a random direction and moving that way. 

 

The forest is still really dark and creepy. It’s full of weird and sudden forest noises, like the snapping of twigs under her feet and the shrill cries of some unidentifiable bird. Scott walks and walks and walks until she’s standing in the middle of the woods, totally creeped out by the sudden disappearance of all noise. The silence rings in her ears loudly, and then the groumd starts to shake. It’s either an earthquake or a genetically re-engineered Tyrannosaurus Rex; knowing her luck, it would probably be both.

 

She’s not really expecting a panicked herd of fucking deer, that’s damn certain, and she has to duck pretty quickly out of the way. The hooves seem endless and she doesn’t know how she escapes being trampled, just does, and can’t really be happy about it because her foot twists on top of loose soil and suddenly she’s tumbling down a hillside like Jack and Jill.

 

Scott stops with twigs in her hair and dirt in her mouth, and when she tries to get up and move, she notices she’s right by a freaking dead girl.

 

And only half a freaking dead girl at that.

 

Scott jumps up with a scream, one that’s barely heard over the cacophony above. Her feet trip over one another and she’s slamming back down into the dirt just seconds later. Her feet keep moving, desperate to put some distance between her and dead-girl, and she ends up crab-walking away from the body whilst still shouting her head off.

 

The deer are still charging up ahead, panicked as fuck and that’s not helping her calm down. She pitches herself forward, onto her hands and knees and pushes her body up off the ground. She’s running almost too soon for her body to handle, and her hand goes for her inhaler straight away. Her mad dash brings her to a clearing thankfully devoid of both crazed deer and mutilated corpses and it’s a good thing because the tightness in her chest has her nearly keeled over.

 

Shaking fingers pry off the lid of her inhaler and it drops somewhere among the dirt and leaves. But she doesn’t care because she just saw a _fucking dead body_ and her throat is closing and she needs to breathe so bad. Scott puts the inhaler to her lips, sucks greedily at the first pump, and tries to block out the image of a wide-eyed girl who was missing the lower half of her body.

 

When she hears it, she really hears it. Another silence had fallen over the forest after the deer had gone, and that first hint of rustling and low-pitched growling reaches her ears unhindered. She stops pulling on her inhaler, drops her arm to her side, and debates turning around to find the source. Survival instincts battle with that good old fight-but-no-definitely-fly response, and it takes her three seconds too long to come to a decision.

 

A twig snaps somewhere behind her and she turns in time to see a large, dark shape and two red eyes before something slams into her with all the force of a Mack truck. The growling intensifies and her inhaler goes flying from her hand and she can’t even scream before pain explodes in her side. Blinding, stabbing pain and she can feel its teeth digging deeper and deeper into her skin.

 

Her breath comes back to her and Scott screams up into the night sky in abject terror.


	2. Wolf Moon Pt. 2

Here’s the thing: Stiles loves Scott.

 

And it’s not like a casual, vacant ‘I love you’ between high school girls who say it because they think it’s expected. Scott has been her best friend before her first coherent memory, and they’ve seen each other through some heinously bad shit. 

 

Stiles was the person Scott went to, tilted her head and scrunched up her nose before saying, “Stiles, I think I’m gay.”

 

(And her response of “like that’s a secret” wasn’t exactly sensitive or understanding, but Stiles has always lacked a functioning brain-to-mouth filter and Scott’s always accepted that).

 

Scott was also the first person Stiles told about the doctor’s diagnosis, shaking a bottle of Adderall in her hand while musing, “I think a fifth opinion might be in order.”

 

Scott had just squinted at the doctor’s report, “So ADD, or ADHD, or some other alphabet combination?”

 

(And it was nice to laugh then, whether or not it was intentional. With Scott, it’s kind of hard to tell. Stiles loves the girl, but Scott isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed and her wide-eyed obliviousness to the world around them is both endearing and frustrating.)

 

Of course, there’s other things, harder things. Stiles was the one who slid through Scott’s window, slipped under the covers, and wrapped her arms around her shaking friend on THAT NIGHT.

 

(“He said maybe I wasn’t his, because no daughter of his would do this,” Scott sniffled into her pillow, fingers digging into the flesh of Stiles’s hands in her attempt to keep herself anchored. “Like, if this is the way I am, then he had nothing to do with it because his genes aren’t that deviant. He said deviant, Stiles.”

 

“He’ll come around,” Stiles had whispered, and both of them knew that was a lie.)

 

And it was Scott, in the hospital, on THAT DAY, holding her hand and crying with her when the doctor came to tell them what they already knew.

 

(“I can’t really remember the way she smelled,” Stiles had sobbed days later, head buried in Scott’s shoulder and the tears on never-ending repeat. “I just-I can’t remember. All I can remember is the hospital smell, the drugs and the disinfectant and shit. I don’t want to remember her like that-but I can’t remember any other way!”

 

“She smelled like roses,” Scott whispered, fingers threading through tangled dirty blonde hair. “I remember, because we brought her that perfume once and she said it was her favourite. Do you remember? Roses.”)

 

Actually, Scott is more family than friend; her sister, if you want to be all label-y about it. And yeah, Stiles knows she’s a trial and a half most days, what with her abundance of energy and inability to walk ten feet without causing massive property damage. And she also knows that Scott isn’t exactly the smoothest operator, what with her complete lack of subtly and zero-to-lovestruck track record with girlfriends. The way Stiles figures it they’re two halves of the same graceless whole. Stiles and Scott, Scott and Stiles-that’s way it’s always been. If one needs the other, she’s already there because she’s been there from the start.

 

And if one wants to run stupidly into the woods at night to search for mutilated corpses, the other follows without hesitation.

 

It takes a lot of super willpower not to dissolve into a mess of snot, saliva, and tears when Scott fully explains what happens after Stiles gets caught. The sheriff is a good dad, and pretty laid back considering how many times a week Stiles does something stress-inducing. But his limit apparently lies something between disturbing crime scenes and wandering around the woods at night when there might be a killer on the loose. At the time, covering for Scott had seemed like the thing to do, because there just isn’t enough justification in the world for Scott to endure weeks of grounding for accompanying Stiles on her latest insanity.

 

It isn’t until she sees the deputy escort that she realizes how stupid this whole thing is. Her dad has the good officer follow her home and then park across the street for about an hour to make sure she doesn’t try to take off. 

 

In half hour, Stiles is manoeuvring her way out her dad’s bathroom window, her cell phone pressed tightly against her ear. Scott has failed to answer her phone all of the hundred and fifty times Stiles called her, and screw it. She’s not going to sit at home with Scott possibly lost or injured in the woods. She’s thinking of how many times she can say sorry and in how many languages when Scott finally answers. The shock and the joy of the moment nearly end in Stiles plunging headfirst off the roof of her house, but her elation at the returned call is more than enough to cover her panic.

 

There’s a five minute conversation in which Scott mentions something about being run over by deer, seeing dead bodies, and something else Stiles can’t quite make out before Scott calls it a night and tells Stiles to pick her up for school in the morning. Stiles is laid out with her back scratching up against the shingles of her roof and her foot caught painfully in some part of the bathroom window, but she feels fucking fantastic hearing that.

 

She manages to get inside, showered, and tucked into bed without breaking any bones in her body, and even her dad seems kind of happy when he comes in to side-eye her for being an eavesdropping rascal. They have a long conversation about boundaries and the integrity of the sheriff’s office; and by conversation Stiles means her dad lists off a set of really creative punishments that he promises to enact if she ever tries this again while she nods all wide-eyed and sort of paying attention. Things get a bit emotional when her dad reminds her that she’s all he has left and just _please don’t wander off after dead bodies and murderers ever again, okay?_

 

This kind of dulls the glee of Scott’s confirmation of continued existence. Just a smidge.

 

But the morning dawns bright and beautiful. She doesn’t drive to Scott’s house; relief make it so she floats there. Scott stumbles out of her front door with a pair of sunglasses on that kind of make Stiles raise both eyebrows and a head of full on sex hair that is just not-Scott.

 

“Trying something new this year?” is her greeting, and it should probably be something like ‘sorrysorrysorrysorry, I’m so sorry, have I mentioned that I’m sorry?’.

 

Scott grunts, says the sun is bothering her today, and waits until Stiles is on the road to reveal that she was bitten by a wild animal last night. Bitten in a way that she nearly lost an entire chunk of her midriff. By a wild animal. And she put Polysporin on it before bed and prayed for the best.

 

Stiles is barely able to get the Jeep to the side of the road before the hyperventilating kicks in at full strength. Scott is not helping, with her own hysterics and promises of good health. All Stiles really can process is that she left her friend in the woods last night to be chomped on by a friggin’ wolf.

 

Only . . .

 

“Wolves . . . not in California . . . sixty years,” is what she manages in between gasps and tears. 

 

“Maybe it was a mountain lion!” Scott is probably trying to make her feel better, but the image of a mountain lion gnawing on her best friend is not any better.

 

And yet-

“How . . . mistake a mountain lion . . . wolf? Not that . . . dense!”

 

Five more minutes of this, and Scott finally yanks Stiles across the car and into a bear hug that doesn’t really help the breathing issues at all. But Stiles fills her nose with the scent of Scott’s shampoo, a citrus thing she’s used since they were kids, and works the air in and out of her mouth until something like calm returns.

 

“This wasn’t-“

 

“It was,” and she might hiccup a bit around those words. “I took you out there; it was my doing. I’m sorry.”

 

Scott, sweet and good-natured to a fault, just grins. “You were forgiven before you even apologized. I followed you, Stiles. You didn’t put a gun to my head. And if I had a working brain, I would have given myself up when you got caught. For some reason, my mom was scarier than the woods at that moment.”

 

Stiles feels her lower lip wobble, and then throws herself at Scott once more. They stay like that, hugging for all they’re worth, for just long enough to put them in danger of being late. Stiles disengages as gently as possible, and still manages to take some of Scott’s hair with her. The damage does nothing to dent the sex-hair aspect of the hair. It’s unfair, especially if it really is unintentional.

 

“So, you think groping each other for fifteen minutes parked on the side of a busy road is why everyone thinks we’re lovers?”

 

Scott snorts. “I think they like to think that because the mental imagery is so hot. Or it is, until your elbow clips me in the mouth and suddenly there’s blood everywhere.”

 

Stiles swerves onto the road with a gusto that might be uncalled for. “Don’t be so sure; there’s a fetish for everything these days.”

 

~0~

 

Okay, Scott saying she’s okay is actual bullshit because things are so not okay.

 

It’s not just the sunglasses and the sex hair.

 

It’s not even the immediate attraction to the new girl, because this is Scott. The girl falls in love faster than most people go through tissues . . . or cell phones. Something like that-point is, Scott being in love is like almost standard modus operandi for her.

 

All these things are not really that strange, perhaps some of them are uncharacteristic, but not strange. 

 

What happens later, at the lacrosse tryouts, that’s strange. Like, stranger than anything Stiles has ever seen. And Stiles once locked herself in the police evidence locker and poked around a lot of sensitive case files and found out some things about her kindergarten teacher that she didn’t need to know.

 

Scott, ever hopeful and optimistic, tries out for first-string again. Coach McCullough is usually pretty accommodating, or she had been when she first came to Beacon Hills High. Now, after two years of sharing office space and the athletic department’s budget with Coach Finstock, well, things had changed. Not to mention, Coach Finstock has apparently decided that the boys’ tryouts needed to be sooner than the next day, and is basically bullying Coach McCullough to get her girls off the field after barely half an hour. Coach McCullough looks about ready to strangle Coach Finstock with his own whistle, and snaps for Scott to take goal so the other girls can get some practice in before the boys took over.

 

Scott looks so crestfallen that Stiles tries to intervene, only to get met with the fiercest of the death glares. So Scott takes the net, looking dejected and beaten and it’s sad because one, she had been shot down for first line again, and two, her new lady love Allison is watching from the stands. Stiles does her best to send Scott like tsunami waves of empathic vibes, and it’s really hard when suddenly she’s surrounded on the bench by a group of surly teenage boys irritated beyond reason with their coach.

 

But here’s the thing: Scott does good in net.

 

Scratch that, Scott does fucking _amazing_ in net. Like, she doesn’t miss one shot, not even when Patricia Cotter (first string, captain of the team, and freaking excellent lady lacrosse player) fires off one of her trademark death shots. Scott stops it; never-been-in-net-before Scott stops it, and makes it look easy.

 

And in between her whooping and dancing from the sidelines (which amused most of the boys’ team pretty thoroughly), Stiles takes some time to be flummoxed. 

 

Even both coaches forget whatever squabble they had not-so discreetly been engaged in after Coach Finstock’s appearance to just stare. They kind of do some mental communication that has Stiles wondering how strictly professional their relationship actually is before Coach Finstock does something mind-numbingly stupid-and brilliant.

 

He puts the boys up against Scott.

 

“It was super weird!”

 

Stiles waves her arms in an attempt to further emphasize her point and nearly walks face-first into a tree. She dodges at the last second, trips over some root or branch on the ground, and Scott’s hand on the back of her hoodie is all that stops a sudden face-plant onto the dirty forest floor.

 

“It was not that weird,” Scott helps (re: yanks) Stiles back onto her feet and then commences pouting something fierce. “Maybe I’ve just gotten better.”

 

“At a position that you’ve never played before, ever,” Stiles widens her eyes and is about to start flapping her arms again but Scott grabs her wrist and gives her a look. “Like, you never even played in goal for fun. And suddenly you’re able to stop shots from the best of the girls’ and the boys’ team?”

 

Scott pouts again, and then screws her face into something that is really petulant and kind of makes her look like doofus. “This is about Jackson, right? You know, just because you think he’s all that-“

 

“He is all that, and a bag of chips,” Stiles shrugs off Scott’s grip and points a finger at Scott’s face. “And he couldn’t score on you. Scott, I’m not doubting your skills here, but your skills are limited to playing center because that’s all you’ve practiced and worked on for _years_.”

 

“Okay, so it was weird,” Scott swats away Stiles’s finger and stomps further into the woods. “But, I don’t know, I can’t explain it. It was like, everything was going all slow-motion. I felt like I had ages to catch those shots, and I know it’s weird but that’s what it felt like.”

 

“And your animal bite has disappeared,” Stiles scrambles to catch up to her friend, if only to poke her right where the bloody bandage from last night had previously been. “Like, it’s gone and doesn’t even look like something happened. And we both know something happened, because bandages don’t come pre-bloodied.”

 

“Things have been off all day,” Scott stops suddenly and glares at some random spot in the trees ahead. “The sun freaking bothered the crap out of me this morning, I’m hearing things that I probably shouldn’t be able to hear, and practice today . . . do you think I got some sort of rabies from that thing last night?”

 

“I’ve never heard of rabies that cause rapid healing, superior lacrosse skills, and that can somehow cure asthma,” Stiles snorts suddenly, nudging her friend not so gently with her elbow. “Hey, maybe it was a wolf last night, and maybe it infected you with lycanthropy.”

 

And this moment would have been funnier if Scott knew what lycanthropy meant.

 

Stiles sighs, tries to remember that she’s currently trying to be on her best behaviour to make up for the previous night. “Werewolf, Scott. Lycanthropy means you turn into a werewolf.”

 

And then Scott rolls her eyes like Stiles is the infuriating one. “Ha ha, real funny. Can we just find my inhaler and get the hell out of here? My mom is going to kill me if she finds out I lost another one.”

 

“How will she, if you never need to use it again?” Stiles knows that one day she will have succeeded in teaching Scott about the workings of logic, but that day is perhaps still quite a ways off.

 

“Doesn’t matter; those things are expensive, and if she wants to know where it is and I don’t have it,” Scott makes a face. “I hate it when she gets all exasperated with me. I’m trying not to be a total irresponsible disaster this year, just for her.”

 

And this is the point where Stiles should tell Scott that she doesn’t have to suck up to her mom, because Melissa McCall is a wonderful woman and would never turn her back on her lesbian daughter for losing an inhaler. But Scott tends to obsess over these things in light of THAT NIGHT. So Stiles makes a note to talk about it when Scott is less frazzled and perhaps more rational than she is right now.

 

It might be a conversation they don’t have until they’re in university.

 

“So, you lost the inhaler around the dead body, right?” Stiles rises up to her tip toes and does a tipsy, slow turn while craning her neck. “Like, the upper half right? Should be able to find a marker like that, no problem. Unless your imaginary wolf stole both the body and the inhaler.” 

 

She kind of falls into Scott halfway through and they jostle back and forth for a few giggly seconds and don’t come any closer to finding what they need.

 

“This way,” Scott pulls on her elbow to turn her around and pull her forward, only to stop abruptly. Stiles manages only a slight stumble and straightens to find the source of the really standoffish look on Scott’s face.

 

There’s some dude standing in front them, like four feet away, and he hadn’t been there ten seconds ago. He looks super-pissed off and unhappy, his mood seemingly punctuated by his dark jeans and black leather jacket, and the angry way he seems to be jamming his fists in the pockets of said jacket. He’s also wildly attractive, emphasis on the wildly part, and while Stiles appreciates fine male specimens, she tends to prefer the ones who don’t look like they’re about to kill her and her best friend for merely existing.

 

He also looks kind of familiar and Stiles can’t really remember from where but hopes it’s not from a wanted poster up on the bulletin board at the sheriff’s office. “Uh, hi?”

 

“You’re trespassing,” is what dark-and-possibly-a-secret-axe-murderer says. Stiles opens her mouth for some sort of retort, but stops when she notices a strange noise coming from Scott’s general vicinity.

 

Seriously, is her friend growling at this dude?

 

“Who are you?” Scott even sounds uber-confrontational and Stiles wants to call a time-out to figure this shit out.

 

“This is private property,” the dude has locked eyes with Scott and Stiles feels like some sort of fight might break out and what the hell? Scott doesn’t get into fights, especially not with scary looking dudes in the middle of the forest.

 

“That’s not an answer,” and for real! Scott even starts trying to take a few steps forward, to crowd the guy, and Stiles is having none of this. Whatever rabies Scott caught from her not-wolf last night is not going to get the two of them killed today.

 

“We’re sorry,” Stiles skitters forward and puts herself between Scott and angry-dude and tries for an apologetic smile. Something in the back of her brain lights up and she thinks she might know what’s going on here, but really she doesn’t. “We didn’t know-we were looking for some-“

 

“Get out of here,” angry-dude obviously lacks a basic understanding of social etiquette. One of his hands emerges from his jacket and suddenly something is flying at Stiles’s face. Of course, Scott’s newfound ability to catch anything from any angle and at any speed stops said object from hitting Stiles square in the nose. Stiles blinks and turns to look over her shoulder, sees Scott holding her missing inhaler, and suddenly has a million more questions than before.

 

“Leave,” and then angry-dude is stomping away. Stiles does have some sense of self-preservation and she waits until the guy is out of sight before rounding on her friend.

 

“Do you know who that was?”

 

Scott is still looking mighty pissed off, but acknowledges Stiles with a shake of her head.

 

“That was Derek Hale!” Stiles throws up her hands in surrender at Scott’s blank expression. “Remember, the Hales? They used to have a house not far from here. Six years ago, the house burned down? Took most of the family with it?”

 

Understanding dawns, sort of, and Scott glares at the inhaler in her hand. “I thought he moved to New York or something. What the hell is he doing back?”

 

“Who cares?” Stiles latches onto Scott’s arm with a touch of too-much vigour. “Have you not seen how nicely he’s filled out? I mean, damn! That’s some kind of nice gene pool.”

 

Scott scoffs. “Can’t believe you. Jackson’s going to be crushed.”

 

“No he’s not,” Stiles lets go of Scott’s arm and pushes her friend a little. “Not that he would notice or anything, because hello? I’ve been pining from afar for over a year now for a good reason. Pining up close involves too much risk. And anyways, I can acknowledge the attractiveness of other males without betraying my love for Jackson. It just means I have working eyes, you know? And this guy couldn’t replace Jackson if he tried. Because hot or not, he’s still super scary. Like, I might like to imagine his face and obviously well put together physique when it’s Stiles’s Alone Time tonight, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want that guy actually physically within three feet of me because, you know, scary.”

 

Scott wrinkles her nose before grabbing Stiles’s arm and herding her back towards the Jeep. “First of all, sometimes you share just a bit too much. And secondly, imagine someone else at nighttime. I know this is the spot where I saw that body, and it’s not here anymore. But wherever it has gone, I’m betting Derek Hale knows all about it.”

 

~0~

 

Days later, after hours and hours of research and a scary shouting session with Scott and a disastrous party at Lydia Martin’s house, it is painfully obvious that Scott is indeed a werewolf and their lives are now fucked up beyond all reason.

 

Because not only is Scott a werewolf, an actual freaking werewolf, and not only are there apparently werewolf hunters looking to shoot all werewolves with crossbows in town, and not only is one of those hunters Scott’s new maybe girlfriend Allison’s father-but on top of everything, Scott tells her that Derek Hale is a werewolf.

 

Derek Hale says he was born a werewolf. And he might or might not have been the one to bite Scott into her new werewolf-hood, but he definitely has enough super-hearing to probably overhear her on that day in the woods when she thought he was out of earshot. 

 

And that kind of sucks. 

 

Hard.

 

~0~


End file.
